Tom Sykes ended the second day of the Jerez combined WorldSBK test as fastest, taking advantage of the absence of his Kawasaki Racing Team teammate, though he came up just four hundredths short of Rea's time. Rea was absent due to an appointment to collect the MBE he was awarded at Buckingham Palace.

Loris Baz made a massive leap forward on the Althea BMW, improving his time by nearly a second, taking second ahead of Eugene Laverty on the Milwaukee Aprilia, who was also six tenths quicker than he had been the day before.

Wednesday promises to be a lot busier at Jerez. Not only does Rea return for one more day, but the Honda, Ducati, and Yamaha WorldSBK teams hit the track, along with a host of MotoGP teams.

Comments

It will be interesting to see how the new rules evolve over the first few races. While it seems to be a given that the dominant role played by Kawasaki and Ducati will be reduced if not eliminated, from what we read it will be up to the other teams to step up and take advantage of the new pieces and parts that will apparently be made available.

From reading the explanation of the new rules, Scott Smart seems to have been given the ability to reign back any team that starts to dominate. However, will this be on a race-by-race basis or at certain parts of the season?

Comparisons can be unhelpful, but the nearest equivalence formula (at least in the UK) would appear to be the major saloon car championship where weight is added to the winning cars after each race. This has ceertainly meant that there are multiple winners but it's not clear if this would either work or be desirable in WSB.

No doubt these new rules will throw up unexpected consequences, but I suggest most of us would heartily endorse anything which prevents the impressive, but ultimately boring spectacle of the last few years.

If you reference back to the original article pointing to the rule changes it appears that it will be evaluated every 3 rounds, despite it saying every 3 races, as that seems assinine to do so in the middle of some race weekends. Rev limits will be the major means in which team dominance will be reigned back.

I agree that some closer racing would be great but being a Rea fan and excruciatingly watch him drag the Honda around far too often it was fantastic these past three years, and I still believe him to be the most talented rider on the grid.

As I type this, I feel as though there may be some clever fellows working out a way to game the system, should be interesting either way.

For sure this is interesting!
And WSBK hasn't been for a while, so I am more open to it than I had anticipated.

Starts out weird, just a few teams. Plus some BSB.
Plus one guy on a Supersport.
Named Nacho.

Odd times.

^ Seniorbiker as I recall the plan is to do a review every 3 races, meaning events as opposed to individual races.

Aprilia sure got screwed last rule change when engine tune came down. Kawasaki got it very right, and now has to take a hit for it. Hoping organisers make a very moderate adjustment then leave it largely be, as opposed to lots of fiddly intervention. The parts availability gig looks good to me. Hamstringing revs less so. The ideas are hard to swallow. When the racing starts though, this may make for barn burner bar bashing and our conceptual distaste could wane.

Ideally, this will bring back some close racing and less predictable results, the series will get more popular again, sponsors will return, teams will have more money, invest more, improve their performance, reduce the gap to Ducasaki, and the equivalency thing can just shrivel and die.

BUT. The real world rarely works like that. You can bet Kawi will already be testing for their second or third 'sucess penalty'. If they continue to throw factory effort at what is in effect these days a privateer championship, the results will likely not change that much. As we've seen from Moto2, even in a spec-class the best riders with the best team behind them will always be at or near the top. But hopefully the gap to the rest will not be so yawning as it has been these last couple of years.